The present invention relates to disposable acoustic pad sensors for capturing heart sounds which have particular utility in digital acoustic cardiography, phonocardiography and acoustic spectral analysis applications.
Acoustic pick-up devices that have been traditionally used for capturing heart sounds have had two distinct disadvantages: (A) they have a poor signal to noise ratio in that they are very sensitive to air-borne noise which requires that a special, quiet room be used for procedures; and (B) they are fairly massive in size and therefore substantially reduce the surface vibrations they are trying to detect.
Commercially available contact microphones are sometimes used to capture heart sounds because they reduce the pick-up of extraneous sounds. On the negative side however is the fact that they influence the surface vibrations even more than other types of pick-ups.
Many of these devices have an additional disadvantage in that they must be held in place. This can introduce unwanted noise from the unavoidable quivering of muscles and creaking of joints in the user's fingers. Belts could be used to avoid this but many users find them objectionable from a convenience standpoint. Still further, many present sensor devices incur signal losses due to air coupling and non-contaneous conformance with the skin.
The sensor of the present invention described herein substantially avoids all these disadvantages while offering other totally unique and desirable features.